Breaking Bad actor Aaron Paul has spoken about reprising his iconic character Jesse Pinkman in the upcoming film that follows on from the widely lauded television series.
The 40-year-old American star admitted that it was "a big weight" off his shoulders to walk away from the tortured role when the show wrapped in 2013, but revealed the reason that he jumped at the chance to play Jesse again.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Paul said: "I really loved Jesse. I knew him better than anyone, but it was a big weight off of my shoulders to hang up the cleats and walk away.
"I thought it was goodbye, and I was OK with that."
In early 2018, the show's creator Vince Gilligan rang Paul and revealed he had written a movie about Jesse.
Within months of that phone call, the actor was back in Albuquerque shooting the top-secret film.
The actor said of his reaction at the time: "I'm like everybody else on the planet - I think Vince and the rest of the writers really nailed the landing with the ending of Breaking Bad, and why mess with that?
"But it's Vince we're talking about. I would follow Vince into a fire. That's how much I trust the man. I would do anything that he asked me to."
He added that getting back into character as crystal meth cook Jesse was very straightforward.
"It was so easy for me to just jump into where Jesse's at mentally, emotionally, because I lived and breathed everything he went through and then some, and so, honestly, it felt like a part of me had gone through that as well," he said.
"All I had to do was just memorise these words and then play them out when they yelled 'action'."
Breaking Bad followed Bryan Cranston's central character Walter White as he transitioned from a mild-mannered chemistry teacher to a ruthless drug kingpin alongside his former student-turned-meth cook Jesse Pinkman.
Netflix recently revealed that El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie will arrive on the streaming service on October 11.
